“Manny, would you keep Doctor Chun company for a while?” Travis asked.
“Sure.” Damn Travis. What was I supposed to do if Chun objected? Wrestle with him? Hit him over the head? I was ready for anything as the others went up the ladder to the control deck, but Chun just sat down in his chair. He looked at me, smiled vaguely, then began moving bits of orange peel around on the table in front of him. I’d never seen a man so tired, so depressed, in my life.
I almost felt sorry for him. I mean, I’d been getting the shivers a few hours ago just being alone on good old, homey Red Thunder, with my friends only a few miles away, and Alicia said she’d felt the same way on her first watch. Chun’s nearest friend, assuming commissars have friends, was over one hundred million miles away.
[352] And it was all baloney, anyway. Secrets? Rubbish. There were no big secrets in the controls of Red Thunder.
“I couldn’t resist needling him,” Travis admitted that evening. “Did you see how he tried to walk under the ship, get a close look at the drive? Oh so casually, like strolling in the park… well, I casually just happened to get in his way.”
“Might have been crueler, you let him see the drive,” Dak said. “What’s he gonna make of it, anyway?”
“You’ve got a devious mind, Dak,” Travis laughed.
Later I bought up what I’d spent part of the day thinking about, our lack of qualifications for exploring Mars.
“What can I say, Manny?” Travis asked. “You’re right. None of us can say we ‘earned’ the right to be here, to be the first. But that’s just the luck of the draw. If we were going to be the only ones here, I’d say this was nothing but a publicity stunt. It is a publicity stunt, remember. But it’s in a good cause, and believe this: In a year, hundreds of geologists are going to be crawling all over this big ball of rock, and we led the way. Jubal made it all possible, and we did it. If you’re worried about what they’re going say about you in the history books, just remember that.”
THE NEXT DAY, Day M4 for us, we rendezvoused at the canyon edge and then took off to the east, stopping every quarter mile or so for Dr. Li Chong to take more samples. This time I got to ride shotgun, it being Kelly’s turn to mind the shop while the rest of us were out joyriding. Alicia and I both warned her of the loneliness, and how it could sneak up on you and make you feel panicky.
“Don’t worry, I’ll just smoke a little more weed,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was serious. Then she shoved us both toward the air lock, swearing she’d be just fine, she could take care of herself.
We came to a part of the Valles that didn’t look that different from any other part, at least to me, and Li had Captain Xu stop. Dak pulled up next to them, and we watched Li go to the edge and stand there, hands on hips, looking down.
[353] “What’s he want?” Dak asked.
“The… the striations, the layering,” Xu told us. “He was looking for a formation like this, but it is too far down, too steep. He is frustrated because of this.”
We all got out and looked down to where Xu was pointing.
The previous night I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the commons and cranked up the DVD reader. We’d brought along a pretty respectable reference library. I found some encyclopedia articles about the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and read and looked at pictures until I finally began to yawn.
It was easy to see that the Grand Canyon and the Valles Marineris didn’t have a lot in common other than both being deep and wide. The book said the rocks near the bottom of the Grand Canyon were about two billion years old. You could see the layering, like a million-layer birthday cake, from different stuff that settled out during different epochs. Then the land got shoved upward by the movements of the crustal plates, and erosion had begun.
Had Valles Marineris been formed like that? Nobody knew for sure. If it did, where did all the water go? Boiled off into space? Sunk into the ground? How much water? Enough to be useful if humans decided to come here in large numbers?
Most geologists-or areologists, as some preferred to be called-believed the Valles had been eroded by running water, just like the Grand Canyon.
That was about as far as I got. So I knew what Dr. Li was talking about, in general terms. The layering here was different. But it all boiled down to… or more probably, froze down to… water. So far Li had not found moisture-bearing rocks or soils, which was what he wanted to find.
“Down there at the bottom, you see it?” Li said, translated by Xu. “Layering, which was caused by a very ancient sea of water. Then… farther up, several more areas of layering, suggesting that seas once again covered this area, at very long… intervals. The water returned. The water must still be here… somewhere.”
[354] We could see the layering he was talking about a long way down the slope, which was about sixty degrees.
“One theory… which Li likes very much, is that water is still present about two hundred meters down. Pressure might keep it from freezing at that depth. As the pressure builds up, water might be forced… what is the word?… laterally along rock strata. Then, at a place like this, that layer has been eroded away. The water is forced into the air, where it freezes. A plug forms. When the pressure is sufficient, the plug blows out, and a slurry of rock, ice, and some water sprays outward, forming an apron of debris much like what we see spreading away from that layer below us, about two hundred meters down. Li wishes he could take samples from that area.”
“Well, heck,” Dak said. “Let’s just lower him down and let him chip some off.”
When Li understood that Blue Thunder was equipped with a powered winch and a thousand meters of heavy-duty poly rope, I thought he would hurt himself dancing around. Travis was dubious, but I think he was interested in helping the Chinese regain some lost face, so he agreed.
We secured Li to the rope and he went over the side, walking backward. In fifteen minutes he was down. He chipped for a while, and then our radios were filled with his excited chatter. Xu smiled hugely at us.
“He has found ice!” he said. “Just where he expected to find it.”
So, in the end, the crew of Red Thunder did get to do its little bit of discovery. Short of finding actual Martian life, it was as exciting a result as anyone could ask for.
WHEN WE GOT back, Kelly was in tears. I just held her for a while, until she could stop shaking and get herself back together.
“I feel so dumb,” she said. “Acting like I’m six years old or something.”
“That’s just how I felt,” Alicia said.
“With me, it was more depression,” I said.
[355] “Why didn’t you call us on the radio?” Travis asked her. “We’d have come back and got you, made some other arrangement.”
“That’s why. You would have come back. I kept telling myself I’d be okay, then I’d start shivering again. Couldn’t stop.” She blew her nose. “I almost decided to come looking for y’all. Follow the tire tracks.”
“That’s crazy, Kelly,” Travis said, not unkindly.
“That’s what I’m telling you, Travis. I was out of my mind. I’ve never been so scared in my whole life.”
Travis told us that, starting tomorrow, we’d operate on the buddy system all the time. No one would be left alone. Since he was adamant about having someone aboard ship at all times, that meant that only three of us at a time could go exploring.
“What the heck,” Dak said. “I’ll take my turn, too. Any of y’all can drive Blue Thunder … well, about half as good as me, and since I’m twice the driver I need to be, that ought to be all right.”